Year end spending is often driven by a lack of planning when it's hard to take a long-term perspective. The agencies are often put in a box because Congress is always looking at the short-term election cycle and posturing for their personal agendas. Therefore, funding isn't approved until half way through the fiscal year which results in the "rush to spend."

Once FY budget request has left the agency, procurement officials need to comb through the requests to identify high dollar programs which can benefit from acquisition planning. Once identified, the aspects of competition, contract type and contract management would be address at a high level with the agency "customer." This would promote the submission of a written acquisition plan (FAR requirement) prior to the FY which funds the requirement. While some may never get funded, the exercise will educate the agency personnel. If funds do become available, the vetted acquisition plan would greatly assist the Contracting Officer bothe during the procurement and after award.

Change of Command ceremonies occur with each new military Commander/Commanding Officer every 2-3 years at every installation. Activities are planned months in advance requiring massive manhours, planning, coordination, materials, equipment rentals, impact on facilities, and administrative costs. Keep the tradition, but minimize the cost and impact by setting limits on the allowed activities and pomp and circumstance expectations.

Services are all about relationships (i.e. working relationships. The procurement process is rigid and dehumanizing -- undermines those relationships before they begin. For services procurement, dialogue is essential. A first pass at a proposal is only the first step in a conversation about how to meet the government's needs. Opportunities for real, human dialogue need to precede proposal writing to improve the quality of that first pass... and a second pass (after feedback from the government) should be mandatory.

The federal employees who end up using procured items have no place in the procurement process. People above them and in different offices decide what is needed and monitor contractors' progress; these same people have little first-hand, on-the-ground experience with the problems they are trying to solve. When the supposed solution arrives, users find that it isn't really what they need.

Agencies should create procurement advisory boards comprising the very same people who will eventually use the items being procured; not supervisors, but people at the bottom who have demonstrated passion for and competency in a particular sector. There should be separate boards for each sector: IT, building services, transportation, security, recruiting, etc.

The advisory boards' job will be to review RFP drafts and insure the RFPs accurately describe the problem at hand; comment on RFP responses to help procurement officers make better decisions when awarding contracts; and give constructive feedback to the winning contractors throughout the process, insuring that their work is sufficiently addressing the problem. It is important that the boards have close, constant access to the work being done, so that when a project begins to go off-course, the advisors can correct it immediately instead of months later, after much money has been wasted.

I propose that federal agencies consider the creation of an online application that supports Crowd-Sourcing so that members from academia, industry and private citizens can provide input and recommended solutions for upcoming government requirements. This type of information sharing would be invaluable during the market research phase because it is more fluid than a static RFI and the degree of information is more robust. Crowd-sourcing has been used by some agencies but the challenge is preventing unfair competitive advantages so wide acceptance has not yet occurred - which hamstrings our ability to leverage the benefits of transparency.

One way to alleviate unfair competitive advantages would be to design the application to protect the anonymity of the external users. Drop-downs could allow them to identify minimal information pertaining to their categories (Industry, Academia, Citizen) and respective sectors (Defense, Homeland Security, Energy etc.) but not specific information like individual or company names. That way federal government employees involved in the procurement process can receive the information from the "crowd" but not be biased because of who it comes from and procurement integrity can be protected in the process.

It would be helpful if the Chief Acquisition Officers Council endorsed the application. Having them as the champion for change would go a long way.

Recently a draft format for interagency agreements was distributed, and everyone agreed that it was a disaster. It was extremely lengthy and included many unncessary sections for most agencies. And was an uneditable form! It was a waste of paper, and no agency wanted to use it. How about using collaboration, preferably restricted to Government personnel who actually have familiarily with IAAs, to design a format for IAAs, similar to the wiki that is being used to design a solicitation?

C-TEK for virtualized modeling of requirements and solutions evaluation. Put the requirements in common/academic terminology, end marketeer jargon, get everyone working on the same requirements and solutions seeking the best apt and agile lifecycle consensus decision. Let the customers and academia design and model initial requirements and academia and industry provide the best solution. Sometime industry does not have customers' best interest as their top agenda. Recognize that great strategy (C*O-Desk) is defining a desired reality goal, but great execution (Warrior/Worker) is building the actuality for US.

Government procurement takes so long and the scopes are so large that the technology is often out of date and can only be supplied by a few big, entrenched vendors.
1. Crowd source ways of breaking projects into smaller pieces that can start immediately. A risk with using social media for requirements gathering is that the scopes will become impossibly large.
2. Require open standards, open development environments, and open source code so that individual pieces of the project can be tracked as they are developed and will fit together.
3. Keep the pieces small enough that vendors other than IBM and accenture can effectively compete for them, reducing cost for the government through competition and creating small business jobs.

Early usability and human factors work brings the end-users of a given technological system into mind from the beginning. There are many methods to help design systems for the user. There are entire fields, educational programs, academic and professional societies aimed at improving interaction design. Stop releasing bad systems and patching them later on!

Federal agencies use different electronic procurement systems, such as AMS's Procurement Desktop and Compusearch PRISM. There's a plethora of them out there. It takes lots of time to train specialists on the use of new systems when they move from one agency to another. Imagine a world where the new contract specialist could simply log on and start using the same system because they knew how it worked. All agencies should use the same software for procurement.